They walk in silence, until Sugar asks, "Do you remember the maypoles in Jackson?"
"Oh, sure. The kids in white shoes, walking circles. The boys would go one way and the girls the other."
Sugar touches her hair. "The State Fair," she says. "Them parades. I never will forget. And remember that carnival?"
"The cow with a human face!" Alice cries.
"Rubber man! The hypnotist!"
"The Siamese calves, two bodies eight legs!"
"You wanted your money back on that one," Sugar says, "because it turned out to be dead and stuffed."
"I got it, too," Alice points out.
"You had spunk, I'll say that."
"Well, think about it. Dead and stuffed, they could have just sewed two regular ones together."
"I've been thinking about that for forty years, Alice."
"That dead calf?"
"No. You. Telling the man you wanted your nickel back. I wisht I'd had more of that. I feel like I didn't show my girls what I was made out of."
Alice is surprised to hear this admiration from her lively cousin. "Seems like they turned out all right."
"Oh, sure. The boys are a peck of trouble, but the girls, they're fine. You didn't meet Johnetta yet. She'll come over after she gets the bus drove. She's something, she's the type to get her money back." Sugar laughs. "She would have climbed over the rope to see if it was two cows sewed together."
Alice has on her jogging shoes, and she is used to getting where she needs to go, but she has to shorten her stride for Sugar, who seems to get winded easily. "You could get a big bowl of soup for five cents," Alice argues. "You couldn't just throw away a nickel."
"No. Still can't."
The two women walk through the shade, their elbows occasionally touching. Whenever they pass a little house and yard mowed out of the woods, Sugar waves at the people on the porch. They are liable to be of any age: a grandmother plucking greens from a bucket, or a man in his twenties with black, greased hands, kneeling over an engine as if he's about to deliver a baby out of it. And kids, by the score. They all wave back, calling Sugar by name. She has already introduced Alice to dozens of people, who seem to know already about Alice. Their names stilt and lean in her head like pictures from an old-time children's book: Pathkiller, Grass, Deal, Stillwater, Doublehead. Often she can't tell first names from last, or where the grandmother's name let off and the children's began. The young man with the engine is Able Swimmer. All of them seem to be related to Sugar through marriage or some catastrophe, or frequently both. Sugar is telling her right now, for instance, "Flossie Deal and I were at the courthouse in Tahlequah the day her son fell off the hotel they was building and busted his insides. Her other boy married Quatie's husband's sister."
Sugar slows her pace even more as they head uphill, and sighs a little. "I loved that State Fair. Seems like ever time we went and sat in them bleachers, there wouldn't be a cloud in the sky."
"They had two fairs. First the State Fair, and after that the Black State Fair."
"Really? I never knew it was divided up."
Alice recalls that she used to find her beloved cousin sometimes naive and in need of protection. "We only went to the second one. We liked it best, there was more music to it."
"There was. And the church floats."
"People dressed to beat the band, with hats and all. I liked all the hats."
"Remember those children that dressed like angels?"
Alice thinks. "No. I remember women dressed like bluebirds, in blue high-heeled oxfords. And I remember when they'd turn on those streetlights that were like light bulbs under fluted pie plates, and we'd dance in the street."
"Don't you remember those children? They'd sing 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' I just loved that."
Sugar and Alice pass by a dwelling that looks slightly more prosperous than most, though less interesting: a yellow brick rectangle set in a huge, flat lawn with nothing planted in it. A riding mower preens in the carport. "That's Les and June Courcy's, they're white," Sugar says, with neither favor nor disapproval, as if she'd simply said, "There goes a white rooster across the road." The two women walk on.
The land is steep. Everywhere Alice looks she sees long, dark loaves of hill cut with forested hollows. Around the houses, almost everyone has a goat to keep down the underbrush, although once in a while a front yard will sport an old orange mower alongside the satellite dish.
As they crest the hill, they're faced suddenly with a long mowed field surrounded by white fences, exactly like the horse farms Alice has seen in Kentucky. A brass sign on the white gate says HIDEAWAY FARMS. The shining asphalt drive trails proudly up the knoll to a stone house trimmed in white. The brass knocker on the front door is huge, as if to suggest you ought to be a fairly good-sized person to bother those within. Alice asks, "What's that place, racehorses?"
"Ostriches," Sugar replies.
Alice laughs at her cousin's sense of humor. "They get a good price for the meat?" she asks.
"No, the feathers. For ladies hats and things."
Alice stares, but Sugar is not smiling. In fact, she looks irritated. "Ostriches?" Alice asks. "An ostrich farm?"
"That's what I'm atelling you."
"Who ever heard of the like?"
"I never did," Sugar admits, "before this fellow name of Green come in from New Mexico or New Hampshire, one of the newer states, and says you can get rich on raising ostriches. He's been trying to get the state government in on it. The thing is, though, you have to be rich to start with, to raise ostriches. They cost you around twenty thousand dollar for a pair, just to set up housekeeping."
"Lord," Alice states. "Every feather on their hide must be worth a thousand."
"That's about it. The fellow was trying to sell the eggs for a hundred dollar, telling people around here they could hatch them out and get into the business that way." Sugar starts to giggle. She holds her fist in front of her mouth. "Roscoe's friend Cash, that just moved back here from Wyoming, told the man he'd buy one if Mr. Green would promise to set on it himself."
Alice feels intensely curious. She has never seen an ostrich, and combs the ridge for the sight of sassy tail feathers and a long pink neck, but she sees only velvet grass. "I don't reckon they're out today," she says at last, disappointed.
"Oh, you see them, some days," Sugar insists. "The kids like to pester them to pieces, to try and get them to run. Or spit, I heard they'll spit if they're mad. I don't know that a bird could spit, but they're an odd bird. They don't bury their heads, that's just a tale. Mr. Green says he's going to shoot the kids with rock salt, and that's not a tale, he'll do it. He said out loud in the grocery he'd like to see Boma Mellowbug drop dead tomorrow."
"Who?"
"Boma Mellowbug." Sugar nods at a great ramshackle house nested into the woods just over the fence from Hideaway Farms. The house itself is small, composed of wooden shingles, but it has many things tacked onto it to increase the living quarters, such as a school bus, very rusted. Alice can see chairs and a stovepipe inside the bus, and so many plants growing in there that their leaves jam against the windows and windshield like greenhouse plants. Horse trailers and refrigerators are parked in the yard among the huckleberry bushes. A trio of hens step primly around the splayed, spotted legs of a dead-looking beagle.
"What's the man got against Boma?" Alice asks, though she can guess. The white fence between the two properties could be the Iron Curtain. It's not clear to Alice, though, which country she'd want as her own, if she had to choose.
"Well, mostly he hates her bees. She's got bees living in her roof. He says they're going to kill his birds, but they wouldn't. They're good bees if you love them, and Boma does. A bird wouldn't know enough to hate a bee, I don't think. Do you?"
Alice has already decided that Heaven is a hard stone's throw beyond her ken. "I wouldn't know," she says, which is the truth. Nothing in her life has prepared her to make a judgment on a war between bees and ostriches. As the
y walk slowly past Boma's mailbox, which has been fashioned from a length of drainpipe and a wire egg basket, Alice hears the faint, distant thrum of the hive. She makes up her mind that for as long as her mission takes, on this stretch of Heaven's road at least, it would be a good idea to love Boma's bees.
FALL
21
Skid Road
TAYLOR TURNS THE HANDI-VAN UP Yesler Way, climbing the long hill above the waterfront. The streets are lined with dapple-trunked sycamores. From between the buildings come sliced glimpses of cold-looking water. A blind passenger in the seat behind her is telling Taylor about how she is forgetting the colors. She has lost all of them now but blue. "I think I recall blue," the woman says, "but I haven't seen it for forty years, so I have no idea how far off track I might really be."
Taylor stops carefully at a light. This morning she made a hard stop at a railroad crossing, and someone's seeing-eye dog slid all the way up the aisle from the back. She could hear the toenails scraping over the grooves in the rubber floor mat. After the van had come to a respectable standstill, the dog simply got up and walked back to the rear of the van, making Taylor feel terrible, the way people do when you step on their toes and they sigh but don't say a word.
"I never thought about that, that you might forget colors," Taylor says, trying to concentrate on her driving and also be friendly to the blind passenger, although this conversation is depressing her deeply. She recognizes the woman as a regular: Tuesdays and Fridays, for dialysis.
"Oh, you do, you forget," the woman insists. "It's not like forgetting somebody's name. It's more like you have in mind your idea of a certain color but it might drift, you know. The same way you can drift off the note a little bit when you're singing."
Taylor's radio comes on in a fit of static and demands to know her location.
"I just plussed at Pioneer Square and I'm ten-nineteen to Martin Luther King," she says. "I have two minuses at Swedish Hospital."
"Okay, Taylor, ten-twenty-seven after that," says the radio.
"Ten-four," she replies.
To get the job with Handi-Van, Taylor only needed a good driving record, a Washington State license, and three weeks of training, plus a course in CPR. The hardest part was learning to use the radio code, which she still feels is unnecessary. It doesn't actually save syllables, in Taylor's opinion; for instance, "ten-twenty-seven" is no easier to say than "return to base." It's probably less embarrassing to say "ten-twelve" than "I need a bathroom break," but the code doesn't keep any secrets, she has discovered. Yesterday the radio announced a 10-161, and all six of her passengers looked up and asked anxiously, "What's that?" Taylor had to read the code display on her sun visor to find out it meant an intersection obstructed by an injured animal. She could imagine every Handi-Van driver in the city looking up at the sun visor on that one.
On her way up Yesler, Taylor passes her own apartment, which resides in a long brown box of a building with twenty identical doors in the front, spaced every twenty feet or so like boxcars. The apartment is gloomy, with battle-scarred linoleum and precariously thin walls and neighbors on both sides who shout a lot in what sounds like Chinese; sometimes Taylor gets the feeling the two sets of neighbors are shouting at each other, using her apartment as a conduit for curses or strange instructions. But it's a roof over their heads, for now, and she's feeling more optimistic about finances. It took only about two-thirds of the $1,200 Alice gave her to pay the first month, get the lights on and move in. The rest she hid away inside a plastic cube on her night table that has family photos smiling on all six sides--Jax and Turtle back home in the Retarded Desert; Jax wearing his swimsuit and a paper bag over his head; a very old snapshot of Alice shelling out lima beans; that kind of thing. Taylor figures that's the last household object on earth a burglar would steal. Barbie is still with them, and was partly responsible for their winding up here; she insists the Pacific Northwest is on the verge of becoming very popular. She also agreed to use some of her loot to help cover expenses. For the time being, Barbie looks after Turtle in the daytime, and starting this week, Taylor is making eight dollars an hour.
She has decided she likes this city, which seems like Tucson's opposite, a place where no one will ever think to look for them. Bodies of water lie along every side, and snowy, triangular mountains crouch on the horizon, helping her to orient her mind's compass needle as she winds through unfamiliar city streets. Several times each day she has to drive the van across the lake on one of the floating bridges that bob like a long, narrow barge. Apparently they couldn't anchor them, as is usual with bridge construction, because the lakes are too silty and deep to sink concrete roots into. Taylor got this information and a world of other facts from Kevin, a fellow Handi-Van driver who has asked Taylor seven or eight times if she would like to go out with him. Kevin doesn't exactly float her boat; he's a pinkish young man whose jeans always appear brand new and never quite fit him. Kevin's main outside interest seems to be the pale mustache he is trying to grow. He talks in radio code even when he's off duty. In spite of all this, Taylor is about to relent. It's been so long since she had any fun she's afraid she'll forget how. The next time she talks to Jax, she wouldn't mind telling him she was dating someone. She makes her decision while she is helping the woman who has forgotten color find her way to the fire-engine-red door of the hospital: this Saturday, Taylor and Turtle will go somewhere with Kevin. If he didn't have Turtle in mind, that's his tough luck. He can go along with the idea, or he can turn himself around and 10-27.
Barbie and Turtle are out on the tiny patio behind the kitchen when Taylor gets home from work. Barbie has on a pink bikini and is lying on a bedspread, working on her tan. She looks like some kind of exotic bird tragically trapped in a rotten cage. Taylor slides open the stubborn glass door and drags out one of the falling-apart kitchen chairs, reminding herself to borrow a screwdriver and some screws from the garage at work. The late-afternoon light seems too weak to penetrate human skin, but it's the first time they've seen the sun in two rainy weeks, and Barbie claims she can't miss her window of opportunity. She says her tan is an important element of her personal identity. She has put Turtle to work cutting out gold foil stars and gluing them onto a short denim skirt Barbie found at a store called Second Hand Rose.
"That's going to fall apart the first time you wash it," Taylor observes.
Turtle stops cutting out stars. She lays the scissors carefully on the cracked concrete patio and comes over to sit on Taylor's lap.
"Oh, I know that." Barbie is lying facedown and her voice is muffled. "I just won't ever wash it. See, Taylor, this is costuming, it's not like regular clothes."
As far as Taylor can see, everything Barbie wears is a costume. "What happens if it gets dirty?"
Barbie turns over on her side, looking a little peeved. "I'm careful, okay?"
"Okay. It's your skirt."
"This is going to be the All American ensemble," Barbie says patiently. "It goes with a red-and-white-striped halter top and a lace petticoat. It's just come out, we saw it today when we were scouting out what's new in the Barbie section. I'm like, this is so perfect, but it's not going to be easy to get lace like that. That's going to be a challenge."
Taylor is tuning out; she's learned when to stop listening to Barbie. She knows she won't get a quiz later on the All American ensemble. Kevin, the computer whiz, would say that Barbie is all output and no interface. Taylor strokes Turtle's hair. She's wearing the same green overalls she wore on the Oprah Winfrey show, though they are a good deal the worse for a summer of wear, and, Taylor notices, they're short in the leg and tight around the middle. Her toes have grown an inch or two past the ends of her sneakers; Taylor was horrified to realize Turtle was doubling up her toes in there, without complaint. Now she's wearing Barbie's size-six yellow flip-flops. She'll have to have new clothes before she starts school in a week and a half. More costs. Taylor feels defeated. If only Barbie's wardrobe talents could be put to civilian use.
"What did you do today?" she asks Turtle. "Besides scouting out the toy store and cutting out stars?"
"Nothing."
Taylor doesn't consider Barbie the ideal baby-sitter, but she's obviously short on choices. She hopes school will begin before Turtle gets warped by the world of fashion design. "You want to go to the beach or something on Saturday?" she asks.
"Yes." Turtle leans back against Taylor's chest. She takes both Taylor's hands in hers and crosses them in front of her.
"I've decided to go out with Kevin," she tells Barbie.
"Who?" Barbie asks, with genuine interest.
"That rabbity guy from work. Just mainly so he'll quit asking."
"Oh, right, Taylor. Like going out with somebody is a real wonderful way to give him the message you're not interested."
"I see your point."
"Did you bring a newspaper?" Barbie asks.
"I forgot."
"Taylor! This is, like, the fiftieth time I've asked you. I wanted to look at the want ads."
"For a waitress job? But think about it, it's not worth it. You won't make as much as I'd have to pay for baby-sitting."
Turtle glances up at Taylor, her dark eyes showing a rim of white below the pupils and her mouth tucked like a made bed.
"Oh, I can make money all right," Barbie says. "And I don't mean waitressing, either. All I need is some job in an office with a color Xerox machine."
Taylor is afraid to ask for more details on this scheme, so she doesn't. But after a minute Barbie rolls over on her back and half sits up, so that the muscles form ridges in her narrow abdomen. She shades her eyes and looks at Taylor peculiarly.
"You want to know why I left Bakersfield?"
"You said there weren't enough career opportunities for Barbie lookalikes."
"Well, I lied," Barbie says flatly, her voice stripped of its usual friendly effort. "I was wanted for counterfeiting."
"Counterfeiting money?"
"What else can you counterfeit? Duh."
"How?"
"A color Xerox machine. It's so easy. Just come into the office a little early, lay out some twenties on the glass, copy them front and back, and blammo, you're ready to go shopping."